OK, I typed in the link as stated in the browser and it reduced the pic but it doesn't take me to your site. could you put in step by step instructions for us dummies. Also, why isn't the photo showing up like everybody else's?

You need to put the link in the forum's IMG tags so it gets displayed as an image and not a link .. use the little icon of two mountains with a sun in the editor, that will put the IMG tags in for you.

That was my question. And i'd be curious to know what it costs to set up and run a site like this.

Doug, is there no way you could set up a search function that would return all posts by a user that have images in them? So someone could at least go back and find broken images they've posted, and move them somewhere else?

That was my question. And i'd be curious to know what it costs to set up and run a site like this.

We built it for ourselves because all of these photo sharing sites are hit and miss over time.

It's build on AWS+EFS+RDS (read: fast, scalable, redundant)

It's not a commercial website .. no ulterior motives .. I don't need another business.

There are only about 250,000 images hosted right now, if it ever got to the point where we needed to supplement the costs I would probably just ask for donations, or limit the number of images. Really, at the scales we build solutions, it would have to be many millions of images before it would be any kind of issue.

It's more or less self-maintaining. It will either store images for 10 days or if you put in your email forever. The service will automatically email you occasionally to verify you are still there and if you don't click the link to "check in" after X verification attempts it will just delete your images. This is all based on an algorithm that includes hits per image, number of images hosted, size of images, etc. The emails aren't bothersome, you could store hundreds and only get a few emails a year.

Right now it sites quietly among other solutions we've build, we host so much data it's not even a blip on the radar. It will be there as long as we need somewhere to host our images.

It does some clever things too .. one day .. if I feel like taking a break from building my RV .. I may write up a help doc

Probably one of the biggest downsides to most Forums, like vBulletin and PHPBB is link rot with photos.

We have some really great threads that I have came across in my searches from past builders, but the photos in those posts have all rotted and are no longer available. Photobucket, and a few others that were used in the past are still around, but they have changed the way they link to their photos, so you end up with the photos disappearing from a thread.

Storing the images in the actual bulletin board itself is doable, but can get very expensive after the site has been running for so many years. Photos don't compress very well, so I totally understand why most BB owners don't use the option.

Imgur.com is about the only solution I have found where an image will truly stay around forever, for free. In the years I have been using them, I haven't had any link rot, and they made a commitment to prevent link rot, because their primary user base spawned from Reddit. The problem with Imgur is that most people don't realize you can do scaling with it pretty easily since they don't publicize it very well.

In my example above, I can do something like this:http://i.imgur.com/WgXJI9Lm.jpg <--- Notice I added "m" to the end of the random url before the .jpg. That will give me a medium thumbnail of 320x320 like this when I embed:

Or I could just change that "m" to an "l" to get a larger one:

Or use any of the above scaling options. The problem is, most folks don't realize Imgur can do this.

But there's no provision for loading multiple images at one time. The only choices are to get a ten-day temporary hosting or to submit your email with each image for a permanent hosting. With multiple images, that gets old in a hurry.

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